So in this video, we're going to talk about hospitals as a birth setting.

And by the end of this video, you'll be able to describe an acute care environment,

talk about the importance of practice variation from hospital to hospital,

and identify where you two can find hospital statistics.

It's important for us to realize that hospitals are acute care facilities

that specialize in treating acute illness and injury. Hospitals are an obvious choice for families

who have complications that require medical or surgical intervention or for families who choose to have

high intervention births.

However, when normal healthy pregnant people give birth in hospitals, their care can get swept up into the acute care culture.

A common philosophy that you may see in hospitals is what if something bad happens instead of what is happening right now.

Because hospitals are often large institutions, they have to run on routines and they have a lot of

policies and procedures to guide practice. Some standard protocols that are meant to prepare for

problems that may never arise can disrupt normal labor for some healthy

pregnant people. So not only is a hospital, a clinical environment, and a medical model environment,

but it's also a business and institutional environment. This is why in the other module where we talk

about evidence-based care versus routine care,

many people in hospitals go on to receive interventions whether or not they need them because

it's the routine.

When it comes to midwives and OBs working in hospitals, when I did an interview of midwives

and physicians across the country and we talked about the

relationships between midwives and obstetricians, some of my interview subjects stated that

the obstetricians welcomed the midwives and the extra business that they brought to the hospital

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